virtualization.info Editors

At the end of January Microsoft silently updated its Linux Integrated Components package to version 2.0, introducing the long awaited support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) guest operating systems in Hyper-V.

Microsoft announced future support for Red Hat operating systems in July 2009, since the open source vendor joined the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).
Customers had to wait no less than seven months to finally have a version of Hyper-V Linux Integrated Components that supports RHEL 5 (including 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 versions, both 32 and 64bit).

Like for Novell SUSE Linux, Microsoft doesn’t include in the package the optimized drivers for mouse. To have those customers need to rely on Citrix, which is offering them as open source through the Project Satori.
On top of that Linux Integrated Components still only supports Linux virtual machines with a single virtual CPU.

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Leostream announces today a new minor version for its Connection Broker that arrives over five months after the 6.2 release.

In this update the company introduces a number of new features:

• support for the open source version of Xen (the one released by Xen.org)
• support for Sun Secure Global Desktop Software
• support for Ericom Blaze (which comes from the technology partnership signed in November 2009)
• a web client to access virtual desktops over HTTP/S connections
• control over the remote desktop protocol used by remote clients when multiple protocols are available
• a more granular set of roles and permissions that separate end users and administrators rights

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A couple of weeks ago Citrix published a new architecture blueprint for its VDI platform XenDesktop.

The 38-pages document provides guidance to design scalable virtual desktop infrastructures based on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005, Citrix Provisioning Server 5.1 and of course XenDesktop 4.0 (which includes the hypervisor and XenApp 5).

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Last month VMware lost Ganesh Mahabala, its Regional Director for India and SAARC region, CRN reports.

Mahabala has worked in VMware for almost three years and now has joined the system integrator Valuepoint Systems.

This is the third major change in the Indian executive team that virtualization.info reports.
In July 2009 VMware hired T. Srinivasan as its new Managing Director and in October 2009 Shrimathi Ambastha as its Director of Technology.

At the beginning of January Microsoft launched its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing offering: Windows Azure.
Despite the company’s Chief Architect Ray Ozzie said that Azure will be able to compete with Amazon EC2 and similar Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds, this component is not yet accessible, or at least we couldn’t find it, and Microsoft didn’t even officially confirm it exists.

A couple of months ago virtualization.info suggested that the IaaS component of Azure may appear in March, because Microsoft is going to release a cloud toolkit that month. 
It seems that Azure will indeed start hosting virtual machines in March 2010 according to TechTarget:

…Microsoft has announced plans to add support for Remote Desktops and virtual machines (VMs) to Windows Azure, and the company also says that prices for Azure, now a baseline $0.12 per hour, will be subject to change every so often.

Prashant Ketkar, marketing director for Azure, said that the service would be adding Remote Desktop capabilities as soon as possible, as well as the ability to load and run virtual machine images directly on the platform. Ketkar did not give a date for the new features, but said they were the two most requested items…

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At the end of January VMware revealed that is working to increase its virtual machines density up to 16 VMs per core, mostly for VDI environments. That is twice the average amount of VMs that customers seems able to accommodate today, and VMware suggested that this record depends on new Intel Xeon 5500 (codename Nehalem) CPUs.

Anyway, that number came out during an interview, with no additional details, so there’s a lot of analysis to do before getting excited.
Nonetheless, the claim generated much interest (and skepticism), at the point that Citrix decided to answer.

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In September 2009 VMware announced an OEM agreement with RTO Software to offer its Virtual Profiles product as part of View.
Virtual Profiles is a mandatory piece to manage the so-called persona (the user data and customization of the applications and the system environment) in a virtual desktop infrastructure.

The most interesting part of this deal is that RTO Software has the same agreement with Symantec, which competes in the VDI space with VMware.

Now Brian Madden is reporting that Symantec has suddenly stopped selling Virtual Profiles (called Workspace Profiles in their portfolio) and that every reference to the product disappeared from the corporate website.

Madden suggests that this is a sign that VMware acquired RTO Software. The standard answer he received from the company PR department is that the company doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation.
Of course not.

As most virtualization.info readers know by now, Cisco is leading a new trend in computing architectures by pushing for datacenter-in-a-box solutions, where the entire computing stack is designed and integrated to work as a whole.

It is the Apple philosophy applied to the data center. Or a modern interpretation of mainframes, if you prefer.

Oracle, thanks to the acquisition of Sun, announced its plan to do the same. In some ways HP is already going in the same direction, and may release more interesting solutions in the near future now that it has 3Com. 
IBM seems more interested in POWER architecture than in these x86 computing blocks.

What about Dell?

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Yesterday Quest announced its Q4 2009 financial results, disclosing some details about its virtualization business performance and future plans.

The most important one is that its subsidiary Vizioncore had more than 19,000 customers at the end of 2009.

Another interesting point is that Quest CEO, still sees the VDI market in early stage:

…What was most encouraging is that we really saw the growth accelerate within VDI in the second half of ’09.
The market is still in pilot mode but we saw some early larger deployments, particularly, in finance and healthcare…

Last but not least Quest shared a bit of its roadmap, talking about a future commitment in cloud computing:

…we’re bringing a couple of SaaS-based management solutions to the market in the first half of 2010…

Thanks to Seeking Alpha for the call transcript.

The capability to overcommit memory is an evident advantage that VMware has over competition. 
Marketing departments, partners, and even customers engage endless debates about its value and usefulness in every scenario. 

Microsoft has been particularly vocal in downplaying the importance of memory overcommitment, even if its President of Server and Tools Division, Bob Muglia, candidly admitted: 

we definitely need to put that in our product.

Maybe just a few people remind that Microsoft actually equipped its hypervisor with memory overcommitment capability and that was ready to appear in Hyper-V 2008 R2.
For some reasons anyway the company pulled the feature during the beta phase without disclosing when customers would finally get it.

The time is about to come, apparently.

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